The Great Unknowable End Read online

  “She said her own dog’s been acting off this morning,” Dad tells us, somewhat vacantly. “Been nervous, hiding away. Some change in the weather, she thinks. Said maybe the collie got spooked and ran from his home; that’s how he got himself hit.” After a moment more of dog cries, he adds, “She’s going to call animal control.”

  “Is that the best thing to do?” I ask.

  “Well, hon, I don’t know what else.”

  I don’t know what else either. Only it seems wrong. I do not want this dog to be carried off to an unmarked grave by indifferent hands.

  “We could make posters,” suggests Jill. “We could put them around the neighborhood, so the family can know what happened.”

  My father says nothing.

  I look out the window again. I don’t know why. I suppose I am hoping that the dog will change its breed and its familiar, lifeless face. When I look, though, nothing has changed, and I feel I could cry harder and longer than even Jill.

  “Dad?” I say. “Doesn’t it—”

  “I know.”

  “That’s not possible, is it?”

  “Hon, I really can’t say.”

  “What?” asks Jill, aware that she’s being left out of an adult conversation—as often happens in our three-person family. “What is it?”

  Neither of us tells Jill what it is. We don’t say that this dead dog looks exactly like Major, the collie that belonged to our former neighbors, the Metcalfes. Neither of us mentions that this dog brings back memories of a bad summer and of a closed-casket funeral and of Craig—our Craig. Dad just tells Jill to put her feet down, and, once she does, he starts the car and drives the remaining half mile to our house.

  • • •

  We Mercers keep to ourselves. We do not go to church as our neighbors do. We do not speak to our neighbors, and they do not speak to us. They whisper about us, though. I know, because I hear them every night at the Dreamlight, where I work. They whisper about how the moon drove my mother to madness and my brother joined a cult of weed-smoking hippies and how I never accompany young men to Slater football games the way normal seventeen-year-old girls ought to. They don’t think I can hear them through the plexiglass of the concessions hut. They’re wrong.

  It wasn’t always this way. Before my mother died, we attended First Baptist Church every Sunday morning and most Wednesday nights. We brought casseroles to neighborhood barbecues, and we had houseguests and parties. I had friends then—Linda and Brian and Dennis and Marci. That last summer my mother was alive, the five of us roamed Slater like wild animals. We played Marco Polo in the cornfields and spat seeds off Brian’s father’s pickup. On rainy days, Linda and Marci and I would play dress-up with a trunk full of Linda’s mother’s old costumes from her time as a professional dancer with the Kansas City Ballet. I always wore the emerald tiara, which took at least eight bobby pins to secure, and I would grant wishes to Linda and Marci with my magic wand—an old green spatula that had warped in the heat of the dishwasher.

  That was life before.

  This is life after:

  My father works full-time as a janitor. He cleans Slater’s schools, its library, and the courthouse. He also cleans Slater Creek Generating Station, the nuclear power plant outside our town that began operations two years ago.

  I used to work part-time at Vine Street Salon and at Dreamlight Drive-In Theatre. Since school ended, I’ve been working full-time at the salon and part-time at the Dreamlight, which means I’ve begun to make a decent income. I don’t intend to move out and buy my own place, though. That would defeat my purpose for staying here, which is to look after Jill.

  For Jill’s last birthday, I gave her the Nancy Drew book The Sky Phantom, because she loves mysteries. I also bought her a new pair of Keds, because she is growing too fast and Dad doesn’t notice these things. He doesn’t notice, either, that Jill has begun to steal my lipstick and wear it to school. I know he won’t notice when she’ll need a training bra. He won’t notice when she comes home from school with bloodied underwear, in need of a tampon and a hug and a comfortable chat about what is happening to her body. He won’t notice with Jill because he didn’t notice with me.

  I don’t blame my father for this. He sleeps most of the day, and he works at night when Jill and I are at home and need him most. When we can spend time together, we spend it well. On Sunday mornings—like this morning—he takes us to Ferrell’s Drive-In and lets us order a malt and a Coney dog and a large order of tater tots. We eat and slurp together in the station wagon with the windows rolled down and the radio tuned to 580 AM, a local station out of Kansas City that plays the latest hits. When we are through, we wipe our grease-coated fingers on napkins, toss our trash, and drive home.

  We are loners, but we’re loners together.

  • • •

  When we arrive home, Jill races to the house and uses her latchkey rather than wait for my father to open the door.

  Dad and I take our time. Usually, he makes a show of how much his belly has bloated with the food from Ferrell’s. He pats it as though he’s a Santa-in-training and says, “I need to lay off,” and I will only smirk at him because he never does.

  Today he makes no jokes. We’re silent on our way to the house. We’re thinking of the same thing, I know.

  “Stella,” he says, once we’ve reached the porch. “It couldn’t have been him. That was over two years ago.”

  “Dogs come back, though, don’t they? They come back to their homes.”

  “Two years later? That’s not likely. It only looked like Major, that’s all.”

  “I guess so.”

  Only I am not convinced, and I don’t think my father is either.

  • • •

  Jill and I always watch the evening news together while eating our dinner, and Sundays are an especially big deal because that’s when Cassie Mackin reports on NBC’s Sunday Night News. Jill loves Cassie Mackin. I do too. In my opinion, she is second only to Barbara Walters.

  I place our TV-dinner trays in the oven, side by side, thirty minutes before the news begins. On Sunday nights, we eat the macaroni-and-cheese dinner, which probably should not be considered a real meal. Then again, nothing premade in a tinfoil tray should be considered a real meal. I am hopeless in the kitchen, though, and Dad hardly has the time to eat, let alone cook, so it is frozen trays of macaroni, corn, and peas for the Mercer family.

  Jill sets up our plastic eating stands in the den, and by the time I arrive with our meals and two full glasses of milk, we are primed and ready. I switch on the television as the Sunday Night News theme begins. Jill blows on a forkful of macaroni, her eyes bugged and glued to the screen.

  Sometimes I wonder if Jill should be seeing and hearing everything on the news. Tonight, for instance, Cassie Mackin reports on how two more people were shot in New York City by the killer who calls himself Son of Sam. His killings have been a regular report since last summer, but every time they’re mentioned I worry about how wide Jill’s eyes grow and how still she becomes.

  “Hey,” I say, attempting to draw her attention from the screen. “They’ll catch him.”

  Jill looks at me, affronted. “Of course they will. They’d just better hurry up.”

  When the news is over, we throw away our trays and return to the sofa. I sit on one side, Jill on the other. She is rereading a Nancy Drew book from the library. I am reading The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan, which is about all sorts of things, including the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence.

  An hour passes, and my father comes through the den on his way to work. He kisses my head, then Jill’s, and leaves for the power plant, which is first on his janitorial rounds. Then, at eight o’ clock, it’s my turn to leave for the Dreamlight.

  “Keep the doors locked,” I tell Jill, as is my nightly custom. “Call me at the hut if something’s wrong.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Nine o’clock.” I point a warning finger. “I’ll know if you stayed
up later.”

  Jill nods distractedly, lost again in The Clue of the Velvet Mask.

  I leave through the garage, wheeling my road bike out. Something is off with the chain, and it makes an insistent tick-tick-tick as I ride the bike out of the driveway. I’ll have to figure out how to fix it later.

  It’s windy out—so windy that I wobble once when I mount my bike, overcorrecting for the force of the breeze. I push up to a coast, then pedal faster down Oak Street. Tick-tick-tick-tick. Our neighbor Mr. Metz is out mowing his lawn. I remember attending one of his cookouts when I was Jill’s age. He does not wave at me. I do not wave at him.

  From Oak Street, I take Elm, then turn onto Vine—Slater’s main drag. I pedal away from the shops and streetlights and out to farm country. Vine turns into Eisenhower Road, which is wider and less well kept. There are potholes to avoid, and on either side of me stretches an endless green forest of cornstalks. Dreamlight Drive-In Theatre is nestled in these cornfields, a mile outside the town center.

  The sun has begun to set, lowering through a hazy, plum-tinted sky. Soon, the stars will be out. In a moment like this, when it’s just me and my bike and the road, I get to thinking about That Stella.

  In my mind, I like to imagine two different lives for Stella Kay Mercer. At the start, when I was a child, they were the same road. They forked once, when my mother died, and they spread wider still the day Craig left us. One road is This Stella. Me. The one who works most hours of her life and who cannot even consider the possibility of college. Then there is That Stella. The one who will attend KU and study engineering. The one who might one day help launch a vessel into space. That Stella does not have to worry about her little sister or estranged brother or overworked father.

  I like to tell myself that in another, parallel universe I am That Stella. But in this universe, the one in which I am presently conscious, I have to pay my dues as This Stella. I have to work my nightly shift at the Dreamlight and my daily shift at Vine Street Salon. As This Stella, I must contend with a finicky bike chain, a potholed road, a mighty wind blowing so hard that I have to squint against it, and even then tears spring up in my stinging eyes. When I pass the town’s only billboard, I see that the months-old ad for Slater’s Pizza Hut has torn away, one end tattered and whipping wildly about. Around me the cornstalks sway and bend, undulating with ripples caused by unseen pebbles.

  I skid my bike to a stop, then slide a hair band off my wrist and work it into my hair, pulling back unruly strands from my face. Once my vision is clear, I start again, pushing into the wind and wondering as I do if Mr. Cavallo will cancel tonight’s show. Even if he doesn’t, there are bound to be complaints about the wind affecting the screen; that’s the risk you run with an outdoor theatre.

  There is hardly any traffic on Eisenhower on a Sunday evening, but even so, I keep my bike close to the road’s edge. That is why I see it.

  At first I think it’s a mound of dirt or sod. Then I think perhaps it’s rope or a garden hose. Then I am close enough to really see, but even then I do not believe it. I slow my bike.

  Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick.

  I drop one foot, easing to a stop. I look closer.

  They are snakes. They are small and thin and striped in varying shades of green and black. Garters—nothing to be afraid of, under normal circumstances. I’ve encountered plenty over the years, in my yard.

  I’ve never seen them like this, though. There are at least two dozen of them, and they’re not doing the things I would expect from a pile of snakes. There is no writhing or slithering. They are, all of them, perfectly still. I look closer, at the snake nearest my shoe. Its head is tucked into the very center of its coiled body.

  Now I see. Now I cannot unsee. The snake’s mouth hangs open, pinkish-purple, fangs exposed. Where its eye should be, there is nothing but a small, bloody crater. My vision blooms wider to reveal that they are all this way—all motionless, all dead, piled onto one another.

  My stomach is telling me I need to vomit, but my throat is telling me I cannot. It’s cinched up tight, allowing no breath in and no bile out. Blurry white dots swim inside my eyes.

  I shake my head. I force a swallow. Then another, and another. I breathe in, fill my lungs.

  Move, I instruct my legs. Pedal on.

  My legs listen. They pedal faster than they’ve ever pedaled before—a frenzied tickticktickticktick the rest of the way to the Dreamlight.

  3

  Galliard

  SUNDAY, JULY 31

  I was six years old on the day of the Almost Apocalypse.

  It was the first and only time Ruby hugged me. Normally, the commune doesn’t stand for that kind of thing: We kids belong to everyone, and biological parents aren’t supposed to coddle their offspring. That encourages particular familial bonds, and particular familial bonds create division within the community familial bond that unifies Red Sun. That day, though, Ruby coddled the hell out of me, holding me close to her damp shirt and clutching my hair in her fingers. I’m sure she meant to be comforting, but since she had never hugged me before, the closeness only freaked me out more. I felt suffocated in her arms, drowning in the smell of sweat and turmeric. I felt her heart beating fast against my ear, a sure sign she was terrified. And I knew that if the adults had a reason to be scared, I absolutely did.

  The whole time it was happening, Ruby whispered these words in my ear, like a chant: “We were right. We were right. This is why we came.”

  She clutched J. J.’s hand as we sat huddled among the other commune members, inside Common House. I remember the feeling in that place. The way you feel in the microsecond before a sneeze, when all your energy is focused and your thoughts hang suspended—that’s what it was like. I felt the fear in the room. We were afraid, because the world was ending.

  But the world didn’t end. That’s the Almost part of the Almost Apocalypse.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, the commune siren went off. It was tied to an alert system that the Council had installed in their offices, meant to inform us if a nuclear attack was imminent.

  When that siren went off, the Council ordered everyone to pile into Common House. We waited until a little after seven o’clock that night, at which point Opal came in and told us that we were safe and would not, in fact, be blown off the face of the earth.

  Thus ended the Almost Apocalypse.

  We later found out that there had never been any threat. The alarm had been the result of a technical error. The next morning, the Council brought in an electrician. They also began construction of a fallout shelter.

  Here at Red Sun, we believe in signs, and the Council believed this false alarm of ours to be a warning of real danger—a call for us to prepare a better hiding place, should we be well and truly nuked. Because, had we been nuked while crammed into Common House, it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d survived the blast—we’d still have been exposed to a shitload of radiation.

  I wouldn’t understand any of this until years later, but I never forgot Ruby’s chant: “We were right. We were right. This is why we came.”

  And I agree with that. She and J. J. were right: The US government, like all governments, is corrupt. The Outside is a scary place. Modern folks care more about the latest kitchen appliance than they do about their next-door neighbors. That’s why Ruby and J. J. came to Red Sun. That’s why they stayed. Even so, at the age of twelve, I came to a grim little conclusion:

  My parents were right to come to Red Sun. But had the Almost Apocalypse been an Actual Apocalypse, we would’ve been dead with the rest of the wrong, wrong world.

  • • •

  There’s a strong wind blowing outside when I leave Council House. Even though the sky is a perfect, cloudless blue, a damp gust knocks into me like it’s bringing on a storm. An unfastened shutter slams against Sage House, like a drumbeat keeping unsteady time. In the nearby chicken coops, the birds cluck uneasily. At more of a distance, a dog is howling. I back up, shielding my eyes against
the burning summer sun, to look at the weather vane atop Common House. There, a proud copper rooster is spinning from east to west, then west to north, then north to south, changing direction with every new surge of wind.

  A gust whips up around me, unsettling the red dirt at my shoes, and then something smacks into my face, clinging to my cheeks with agitation. I grab at it, and my hand comes away with a crumpled white sheet of paper. Working against the hard wind, I open the paper to reveal black-ink words:

  DON’T MISS THE MOVIE SENSATION OF THE SUMMER

  STAR WARS—EXTENDED SHOWING, BY POPULAR DEMAND

  AT THE DREAMLIGHT, SLATER’S ONE & ONLY DRIVE-IN THEATRE

  MOVIE TIMES AT 9 & 11:30 PM

  EVERY NIGHT TILL LABOR DAY

  It’s an advertisement from the Outside. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it found its way in here, with winds like these. Still, a chill shoots down my spine, and I drop the flyer like it’s diseased, and like that disease might infect me.

  I clear my throat again and again, in low, guttural heaves. My tics haven’t let up since I left the Council.

  I don’t want to think about the Outside right now. I don’t want to think at all. That’s why I head straight to work.

  • • •

  The Moonglow kitchen is in a lull when I arrive. It’s late for lunch, early for dinner. As I walk in, Dawn, our sous-chef, sends me a wave with her paring knife. J. J. cocks his head and says, “Get started on the peppers. Then onions and beets.”

  No welcome. No acknowledgment that I have arrived a half hour early for my shift. No superfluous instruction.

  Just how I like it.

  From a nearby counter I grab the crate of green bell peppers, delivered this morning from Red Sun’s gardens. I haul it to my station, grab my board and knife, and set to work. With the pepper head down, I make quick vertical strokes across its center. I’d be lying if I said I’m not mentally substituting this pepper for a certain part of Phoenix’s anatomy.